Wendy Doniger
Author
Language
English
Description
Paul R. Pillar's provocative new book ties the American public's misconceptions about foreign threats and behaviors to the nation's history and geography, arguing that American success in international relations is achieved often in spite of rather than because of the public's worldview. These cultural and political misunderstandings run deep, Pillar explains, and persist even when subsequent events contradict them. A host of social, economic, and...
Author
Language
English
Description
Twenty-two-year-old Wendy Doniger arrived in Calcutta in August 1963 on a scholarship to study Sanskrit and Bengali. It was her first visit to the country. Over the coming year-a lot of it spent in Tagore's Shantiniketan, she would fall completely in love with the place she had, until then, known only through books.
The India she describes in her letters back home to her parents is young, like her, still finding its feet and learning to come to terms...
Author
Language
English
Description
Hinduism does not lend itself easily to a strictly chronological account. Many of its central texts cannot be reliably dated within a century; its central tenets arise at particular moments in Indian history and often differ according to gender or caste, and the differences between groups of Hindus far outnumber the commonalities. Yet the greatness of Hinduism lies precisely in many of these idiosyncratic qualities that continue to inspire debate...